We Were The Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

  STUMP CREEK HILL

  Her life was so haphazard, so flung together by impulse and stitched like a rag quilt, it was something of a shock to Mananne to realize that, four years and two months since the morning she'd walked up the lane to the Stump Creek Hill Animal Shelter & Hospital, a sick Muffin in her arms, size was still there.

  Of course, Marianne had been given ajob at the shelter, and living quarters were provided. And she'd fallen in love with the veterinarian who ran the place, Dr. Whittaker West. And Whit West-as everyone called him-seemed fond of Marianne, too.

  So it was at Stump Creek Hill, a few miles south of the small town of Sykesvillc, Pennsylvania, itself about seventy-five miles south of the New York State border, that Marianne was living when, at last, as she'd almost given up hoping, Corinne telephoned to say, in a voice trembling with excitement and dread, "Oh Marianne! Honey! Your father wants to see you! How quickly can you get here?"

  Marianne who'd just dashed to the phone, panting and sweaty, called inside from hosing down Delilah and Samson the elderly African elephants, hesitated only a moment, pressing the heel of her hand against her heart, and said, "I'll be right there, Morn! I'll leave right away."

  She would drive! She would take the Chevy pickup, Out there in the parking lot.

  Corinne said, "Honey, wait-we're in Rochester- At the University Medical Clinic. Huny."

  So Marianne knew what it was, what it must be.

  Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

  After twelve years of exile. Hurry!

  This was October 1988. A Tuesday morning, and Whit West was away in Washington, unless it was Chicago, or-San Francisco? Mananne had helped prepare his speech to the conference of-Associated Humane Societies?-no, that had been the previous week. No matter. Whit was away and Marianne didn't have time to call him, to explain.

  Since High Point Farm had been sold, Marianne had kept in contact with Corinne in a way you'd have to call sporadic. She'd meant to be more reliable, but somehow-well, things happened. She hadn't seen her mom in some time (didn't want to think how long!) and hadn't been back to the Chautauqua Valley since that terrible confused time of Grandmother Hausmann's funeral. How busy, how frantic their lives all were!-time just seemed to be rushing past, like Stump Creek after a rainstorm.

  Marianne had to pinch herseWto realize lam twenty-nine years old.

  Not that she would have given this fact a second thought, except her friends and co-workers at the shelter had surprised her on the eve of her birthday a few weeks ago, with one of Whit's special- recipe birthday cakes (sugarless vanilla-sponge with orange peel) studded with so many tall burning candles they practically toppled off the cake's sides. Marianne had counted the candles, amazed. "Oh, dear. Am I really this old?" Whit laughed, and said, "Old? You've hardly begun, kid." Whit had become touchy since turning thirty-nine, in ways he tried to joke about.

  It was true: for a while after she'd slipped away from Kilburn without telling anyone, including her fannly, Marianne had been Out of touch with Corinne except now and then telephoning hastily from bus stations, pay phones-"Mom? Just Marianne, just to say hello!" Once she'd settled in Spartansburg and was working for Penelope Hagstr"in, she and Corinne spoke together fairly regularly, once or twice a month; but then when Marianne had slipped away from Spartanshurg, after things became too complicated there, again there was a confused jumbled time she was Out of contact with every Mulvaney. She knew of the breakup of Corinrie and Michael's marriage, which she couldn't quite believe, and which Corinne persisted in describing as "temporary, pending," and she knew what there was to be known of Mike, Patrick and Judd. What her brothers knew of her was less clear. She'd lost the narrative of herself, somehow. She'd become a girl who turned up places, stayed if she could get halfway decent employment and moved on if she couldn't; she made friends, sometimes very close friends, then with no warning, as if it wouldn't occur to her that anyone might miss her, moved on. Since the days of the Green Isle Co-op, she'd hardly given a thought to Hewie Miner, or Ahelove. How long ago that all seemed- And Penelope Hagstrom had probably forgotten her by now. Anyway, Marianne hoped so,

  True, Marianne sometimes felt a stab of guilt. Slipping away from Miss Hagstr"m like that. Just a farewell note, and no explanation. Her things stuffed into a duffel bag, and poor startled Muffin in a cardboard box, and-she was gone. One year had melted into the next, and that into the next, and she'd felt the walls of the old house closing in. The probletn was, Marianne Mulvaney was becoming too important there, somehow.

  She'd been sad about leaving. The tall shuttered pale-limestone house on a tree-shaded residential Street -fl Spartansburg'-at first glance it looked daunting, even ugly, but there was a Stern sort of beauty to it, as to Penelope Hagstrom herself And Muffin had been 50 Content there, dozing in one or another of his favorite spots, a faded-chintz window box, on a carpet beneath a never-touched Steinway grand piano in the living room, best of all in the rear walled garden where on warn- days he lay stretched out to a lean, startling length, blinking benignly at butterflies hovering close by, even at quick-darting mice boldly scurrying across his line of vision. At Miss Hagstr"m's, most days resembled most others, in an outward sense at least-cat paradise!

  And Penelope Hagstr"m, certainly, was a remarkable, even an extraordinary woman. A poet-a true lover of poetry-who could recite poems of Keats, Shelley, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost in a way that thrilled Marianne to hear. (Marianne was frequently invited to share meals with the lonely woman, and it was at such times that Penelope Hagstr"m recited those poems she considered "luminous- illuniinating to the soul.") Now in her early sixties, Miss Hagstrorn had been wheelchair-bound for many years, though her multiple sclerosis seemed to be in remission at the present time. She had a ravaged, hawkish, rather noble face, her graying hair parted in the cen- ter and drawn back severely into a chignon-"My Emily Dickinson look, the best we plain girls can hope for." She was surprisingly robust in appearance- from the hips up, with an ample bosom, shoulders, arms; if you couldn't discern her sad sticklike legs beneath. Her voice was alternately melodic and shrill, sweetly reasonable and despotic. There had been other "girl assistants" preceding Marianne, and Marianne had no doubt there would be others to follow. Miss Hagstr"rn seemed to be fond of Marianne, and several times made inquiries into her family background ("But you must be from somewhere and someone, dear-we all are!"), which Marianne gently discouraged; she was always "promoting" her-and raising her modest salary by a few dollars; she encouraged Marianne to "cultivate friends your own age" in Spartansburg, but seemed pleased when Marianne stayed close to home. Yet she was a demanding, dictatorial presence, requiring help in small matters-gettiflg into, and out of, "this damned chair"-aiTld large-the organization of her study, including her vast correspondence that dated back to the mid1940's, and hundreds, or thousands, of poetry manuscripts. (What a confusion this study had been, when Marianne first saw it- As if a hurricane had blown through.) She was always scolding Marianne to "Speak up! You'll make me think I'm going deaf and I am not" and even poor Muffin, for being "nervous as a cat"-which, in her presence, he was. She declared herself, however, a lover of animals, and gave lavish donations to the Humane Society. She declared herself

  "an opponent of organized religion" and resolutely did not give to local churches or church-related charities-"Let them pray to their Almighty God, if they think they're on such special terms with Him." She refused to see visitors who dropped by with no warning; yet complained of being lonely in Spartansburg, "ostracized for being a `poetess.' " She was furious if her morning was interrupted (this was her time, from 9 AM. until noon, for the intense work of composing poems) yet disappointed as a child when Marianne fetched the mail, and there was nothing interesting; no requests for interviews, visits, etc., which she would have probably refused. Or if an entire day passed, and often an entire day did, when no calls came in and Marianne had to report apologetically, "Nothing, Miss Hagstr"m. Not a thing."

  "Hminnil Don't be redundant, Maria
nne," Miss Hagstr"m said sharply.

  Marianne looked up "redundant" in the dictionary, though she guessed she knew what it meant. Supe-fluous, more than is needed. In British usage, out of work, laid off She supposed that was true enough of her. And Muffin, too.

  Though in fact Marianne was kept busy by her wheelchair-bound employer. Confined to the first floor of the grand old house, Miss Hagstr"rn was debating whether to install a "chair-lift," or an elevator-she much preferred the view "from the upper storeys" There were weeks of telephone calls and visits from prospective builders, haggling over estimates, terms, guarantees, which Marianne had to monitor, but in the end, abruptly, Penelope Hagstrom decided not to install anything, after all. There was a period in late winter of 1983 when day followed day in gloom thick as molasses-"the dark night of the soul is out there"-and Miss Hagstrom charged Marianne with planning a two-week trip to Italy, which involved, as one might expect, though in fact it turned out to be even more complicated than one might expect, countless telephone calls to travel agents in various cities. Marianne, who usually enjoyed making calls for Miss Hagstr"m, addressing a third party in the service of another, gradually became worn-out with the project, which entailed, of course, "provisions-ample prowsions-for a `handicapped' party" and which came to nothing in the end, as Marianne had suspected. If Penelope Hagstr"m was uneasy about traveling to Pittsburgh, less than one hundred miles away, by limousine (she'd several times been invited by arts organizations to read her poetry there, and to attend a ceremony in her honor), it was not likely that she would make it to Rome, Florence, Venice and Palermo. When, one morning, Miss Hagstr"m curtly informed Marianne, "I've decided-we're not going. Cancel any and all plans you've made," Marianne must have smiled with relief, for the older woman added, with a sly wink, "Hmmrn! Sorry to disappoint you, dear."

  Marianne laughed. But you can't disappoint me! I don't love you.

  By slow degrees Marianne realized that she'd been hired by Miss Flagstrom partly to absorb the poet's "mistral moods" ("mistral" was a word Marianne did indeed have to look up in the dictionary- strong cold dry northerly wind), since none of the Hagstrom relatives, the few who remained in the Spartansburg area, had the patience for them. Except for a long-deceased mother, no one in the family "read"-certainly not poetry. Within the family, and locally, Penelope Hagstr"m's identity was not that of a well-published and -acclaimed American poet, but that of a luckless young woman, never pretty, yet with an "interesting" face, who had succumbed at a young age to a mystery disease-"MS" the sinister, sibilant euphemism-and lost her handsome weilborn fianc, in one dismal season more than a quarter century ago. No one exactly blamed Penelope for "losing" the fianc,, any more than they blamed her for contracting a mystery disease, and yet-there was an air of subtle reproach beneath the Hagstr"ms' concern for her, which Marianne, who spoke with the relatives mainly on the phone, could detect, and which angered her.

  News of Penelope Hagstrom's poetry publications, critical essays on her work, even an award from the National Poetry Society- none of it seemed to matter much to the Hagstr"ms. Their family money had come from coal mining and was now mainly invested in property, so far as Marianne knew; theirs was the domain of the real, and poetry had no place in it.

  By degrees, Penelope Hagstrdni began to expect more of Marianne. She'd been astonished at the way Marianne had organized her voluminous files of letters, manuscripts, drafts-" You did all this, Marianne?"-and impressed with Marianne's ease on the telephone, an instrument she "abhorred." She began to expect from Marianne a different, more qualitative involvement in her life and work, frequently calling for Marianne during the mornings and reading her drafts of new poems-"Now you must tell me what you think, Marianne, without equivocating. And look tne in the eye." Her own eyes shone brightly, if sometimes a hit fanatically. In the sharp light of morning her skin had a curiously layered look, the soft flesh beneath the eyes deeply lined; her smile was quick and hard and sometimes not a smile at all. When she read her poetry aloud to Marianne, her voice deepened and took on a dramatic tenor that Marianne found distracting. Why was poetry always so intense? Why was everything heightened, made to seem so important? A line of poetry, a single word, even punctuation-why couldn't it just be-well, normal life? Marianne clasped her hands together in her lap, fidgeting, uneasy, worrying that the sharp-eyed older woman, so impatient with what she called "flimflam," could peer right into her eyes and read her unworthy thoughts.

  She protested, "Oh, Miss Hagstr"m-you can't expect me to `critique' your poetry. I have only a high school diploma, I flunked out of college-"

  Penelope Hagstrbm, regal in her wheelchair, her hawkish face uplifted, said, "Of course I can, Marianne, and I do. You're an intelligent young woman. Much more intelligent, I've come to see, than you let on. To whom do you imagine I'm writing my poetry, if not to `Marianne Mulvaney'? Not to the dear departed dead poets, I hope. Not to my `archivist.'

  So, reluctantly, Marianne would offer an opinion: she liked a poem very much though she had to admit she didn't fully understand it; or, she didn't fully understand a poem but she liked it, very much. "But what are you truly thinking, Marianne?" Miss Hagstrom demanded, suspiciously. "I feel you're thinking something sharp and shrewd."

  Marianne, seated in the older woman's study with Muffin twined in her lap half-asleep, protested faintly, "But, Miss Hagstr"rn-why have any opinion at all? Can't poetry be just what it is?"

  Coolly, Penelope Hagstromn said, "Nothing is, my dear. Only what our opinions make of it." She shuffled manuscript pages into a folder on her lap, indicating the poetry session had concluded.

  Marianne fled in relief, carrying drowsy Muffin. Her cheeks burned, her heart beat swiftly. She thought No! I could never believe that.

  Thinking I must leave Spartansburg soon. It's time.

  Much as she admired Penelope Hagstrom, that remarkable woman. And had grown-almost-to love her. But Marianne was being mistaken for a person she was not, and could never be.

  The end caine abruptly only twelve days later. Miss Hagstrom mnade to Marianne an astonishing, wholly unexpected offer of a "promotion": Marianne would become associate director of the Hagstr"m Foundation, as well as continue as Miss Hagstrom's personal assistant, at a considerably higher salary than the one she now received-"An executive salary, my dear." (The Lydia Charles Hagstrom Memorial Foundation for the Arts, which Penelope had established after her mother's death in 1967, awarded grants as high as twenty-five thousand dollars to arts organizations, literary journals, nonprofit theaters and the like, mainly in the Pittsburgh area. The director was a Pittsburgh attorney with whom Marianne occasionally spoke on the phone but had never met.) This proposal was so alarming, Marianne felt faint. There was a buzzing in her ears as of muffled laughter. She began at once to shake her head. "Miss Hagstrorn, thank you very much, but-"

  "Go away and think it over, Marianne. Don't make a decision on the spot. Discuss it with Muffin, if you wish-I'm sure he's on my side!"

  "But, Miss Hagstrom, I couldn't possibly take on such a-such responsibility. I don't have any executive experience. I have Only-"

  "I know: a high school diploma," Miss Hagstr"m said briskly. "We've been through that, I think. Will you stop behaving in such a ridiculous schoolgirl manner, Marianne? That isn't you-I happen to know that isn't you."

  Marianne stared at the older woman, seated in her wheelchair as if it were a throne, her ravaged-handsome head uplifted, eyes shining.

  "Who-who is it, then? I don't understand."

  "I don't understand, I'm sure," Miss Hagstrom said. "But our subject is the Foundation. As you know, we receive many applications for grants each year, and are obliged to assess them carefully; your task would he to organize the files, which you do so superbly, in any case, and to help in the selection process. You might even travel to Pittsburgh occasionally, to interview applicants; or to see work we've subsidized-plays, art exhibits, children's puppet theater. Most of the work you would do from this house, of course, in
an ofFice of your own. Otherwise, I wouldn't hear of it! Wouldn't hear of losing you, I mean. I would miss you too much."